Traumatic Financial Experiences and Persistent Changes in Financial Behavior: Evidence from the Freedman's Savings Bank

This paper was previously circulated under the title "Financial Scarring and the Failure of the Freedman's Savings Bank." For funding, we thank the National Science Foundation (Award #SES-2049393/SES-2049401), the Russell Sage Foundation (Award #2011-29614), the UCI Irvine School of Social Sciences, and the UCI Center for Population, Inequality, and Policy. We are grateful to Marcella Alsan, Claire Celerier, Rick Hornbeck, Maggie E.C. Jones, and Luke Stein; seminar participants at Northwestern University, University of Southern California, Caltech, University of Maryland Baltimore County, Grinnell College, the University of Hong Kong, Beijing University, Tsinghua University, Wuhan University, University of California, Irvine, the Seattle Economics Council, and the Washington Area Economic History Seminar; as well as to participants at the NBER DAE Spring Meetings, Chicago Fed Workshop on Monetary and Financial History, the Economic History Association Annual Conference, the AEA/ASSA Annual Conference, and the All-UC Graduate Students Workshop in Economic History, for helpful comments on earlier versions of this work. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.